Is Reading Good Books Over?
There is great “truth and beauty” in Homer’s Iliad, but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains a classic. But I confess it can be hard to get through. Conrad’s Victory or Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.
So what are the reasons, in this age of the iPhone, Xbox, and PlayStation — or Fox News blondes and HBO — to sit down and read old stuff for an hour or two each week?
Here are a few reasons other than the usual defense of the “classics,” the “canon,” and the glories of “Western civilization.”
Mental Exercise
The mind is a muscle. Without exercise, it reverts to mush. Watching most TV or using the normal electronic gadgetry does not tax us much — indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought. None of us thinks back a year ago to a great video game session. Few off-hand can recall the Super Bowl winner of 2001. I remember the scenes in a Shane or Casablanca, but not many others in the other thousand of movies that I have watched.
By nature, our ways of expression and even thinking always fossilize and are withering away with age and monotony — a process accelerated by the modern electronic age and the neglect of replenishment through reading. The actual vocabulary of our present youth seems to me reduced to about 1,000 words or so. “Like,” “whatever,” “you know,” “cool,” and other pop culture fillers now substitute for entire phrases, a sort of modern porcine grunting. The Greeks used particles to accentuate vocabulary and guide syntax; we used them instead of vocabulary. Our syntax, both written and oral, is reverting to “Spot is a dog”: noun, verb, predicate — period. How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation? I used to listen to farmers without college degrees speak wonderful English; now to listen to a member of Congress almost requires a translator.
Reading alone enriches our vocabulary; it teaches us that good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar. Soon those well-read become the well-spoken.
A Master of Words
Think for a minute: why did the Right often ignore the contradictions of Christopher Hitchens, and the Left mostly give up most of its anger at him? He was not necessarily a classically beautiful stylist, and could be needlessly cruel. He wrote no great history, no great novel, no great single essay that we can instantly recall in the manner of an Orwell or Chesterton. But Mr. Hitchens surely was a rare and gifted writer, polemicist, and savant. To read 800 words was to learn something new in passing. Even in his most ridiculous rant, a nugget of wisdom could be uncovered. A reference to an obscure Eastern European politician might appear side-by-side a line from Wordsworth — and would make a better illustration of his argument than just showcasing his erudition. He mastered the odd, even perverse turn of phrase, the ability to juxtapose the colloquialism next to Latinate pomposity, or to write a ridiculous 10-line long sentence, stuffed with semi-cola, dashes, cola, and commas, followed by a two-word noun-verb sentence that a five-year old could produce. In short, Hitchens was a voracious consumer of texts, and the result was that he achieved what the Roman student of rhetoric, Quintilian, once called variatio, the ability to mix up words and sentences and not bore. He could hold, even shock, the reader or listener from sentence to sentence, moment to moment.
But We Are So Much More to the Point
But you object that at least our current economy of expression cuts out wasted words and clauses, a sort of slimmed-down, electronic communication? Perhaps, but it also turns almost everything into instant bland hot cereal, as if we should gulp down oatmeal at every meal and survive well enough without the bother of salad, main course, and dessert. Each day our vocabulary shrinks, our thought patterns stagnate — if they are not renewed through fresh literature or intelligent conversation. Unfortunately these days, those who read are few and silent; those who don’t, numerous and heard. In this drought, Dante’s Inferno and William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico provide needed storms of new words, complex syntax, and fresh ideas.
Mr. Hanson,
If you rode on the New York City subway system you might be surprised to see the prevelance of riders reading their various ebooks. Of course, they may not be reading Xenophon or Dante, but they are (“are” should be italicized) reading. So, cheer up a bit…all is not lost. It’s not uncommon to see 10 to 15 ebooks on a well-filled subway car, except during the heights of rush hours, when just getting a seat or finding a hand-hold can be a challenge. Just finished your “The Soul Of Battle”, which was very enlightening.
RE: but they are (“are” should be italicized) reading…..
Um, so why not just italicize “are”…. kinda like you just did? That way I could read less.
:-)
(jes’ havin some fun)
“It’s not uncommon to see 10 to 15 ebooks”
-and bound books and other publications along with them.
I wish I could afford an e-book reader. Under Obamunism, that day might never come.
Put the blame where it belongs! I don’t think it’s lack of reading that has made the present generation what it is, but rather, the socialist welfare state and the indoctrination factories that make up our “educational system.”
You have a computer so just download the free Kindle. I did and it’s great.
I beg to differ. I was enjoying Anabasis on the F train this very morning.
If you served in the service, likely any branch, but I can speak only of the USN of 40+ years ago, everyone and I mean EVERYONE had a paperback in their back pocket. I would suspect that the same holds true even to this day.
Someone on active duty should speak up…
tom
I wouldn’t hold technology per se as being responsible for the decline in literacy. In fact, it can do exactly the opposite. My number one use for my iPad is,…wait for it…, reading! It’s great for long-form reading and is a killer PDF reader. As for classics, Project Gutenberg is your friend. I too plowed through many of the great French novelists while riding the subway every day. (Almost as toxic as your pesticides..).
I think the big problem today is the Paradox of Choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
When you walk into a bookstore (real or virtual) and are faced with wall upon wall of books, the most common response is to walk out with nothing. Thus the proliferation of book clubs, Oprah and various other editorializing. My solution for a while was to read nothing younger than 100 years, figuring that if it lasted that long, it had to be pretty good. It’s worked so far.
Oh, and I too loved Grant’s memoirs. Apparently, he wrote it himself too…
DD
I, too, enjoyed Grant’s memoirs and will never forget the image of him writing it on the veranda of his place in NY, as he was dying of cancer, nearly broke, writing to make money to support his family. It is quite possible, though, that Mark Twain helped with the manuscript.
Another great source for reading material, older than 100 years or so, is “LibriVox.com.” Non professional readers bring texts to life by good reading. And the iPod becomes the source for information and illumination. While I work in our garden hoeing veggies or other such chores, I enjoy listening via ear buds to folks with various accents read some of the great works of literature. The selection is wide, the reading is usually very good and the cost is free. Who can beat that deal.
So you could listen to Walden in which Thoreau hoes his beans while you hoe your beans. I might do the same thing while hunting, except you have to listen for footfalls when the woods are dry; so you can read text. But you could use them when it is wet or snowy and you are watching more than listening.
It’s LibriVix.org
Just googled it.
S/B LibriVox.org
“Conrad’s Victory or Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.”
But not by Professor Hanson, you can bet!
“Not a poet in America today could match Virgil. Few, if any of us historians, could write with the flair and judgment of a Tacitus.”
Wow! The professor really knows his Virgil – and modern poetry. And I’ll leave you to guess who among the “few” modern historians “could write with the flair and judgment of a Tacitus.”
That’s precisely the point, son – the good Doctor knows and appreciates Virgil and Tacitus; you don’t.
I can understand why that stings you so much. To discover that your smugness and self-awarded, sanctimonious, hubristic sense of superiority are just hot air and ignorance makes you feel small……Hence your terrible, paniced, painfully urgent need to mock the Doctor with your passive-aggressive, trite, petty faux-witticisms.
It would be better if you DIDN’T pick up any of the ancient texts, my boy – they’re beyond you. One must have an intellect, an open mind and a soul to partake profitably.
Consider yourself schooled, kid.
Bravo Stallion. A masterful rebuke to a snot-nosed punk.
My, my, Stallion, you’re almost as big a blow-hard as the professor. But please, I’ve never ever “paniced.” But yes indeed, “the good Doctor knows and appreciates Virgil and Tacitus” — just ask him. And he wears his learning sooo lightly:
“Obama? He came on the scene as arrogant and self-righteous as young Pentheus or Hippolytus and he is now learning firsthand the effects of his Euripidean smugness on others.”
Or is the prof here aiming at parody?
You felt a special relish, did you not, when you noticed his typographical error! With this fatal lunge you have eviscerated your opponent; STALLION is surely undone.
Now march in your triumph from this website, never return, but treat it as a subject land! Your victory is great and glorious, return homeward O hero, where you will be met at the gates with golden gifts and laurels.
+1
“STALLION is surely undone.”
Yep, undone every time he puts words to screen (or paper, I imagine). You don’t do a bad imitation of a pompous idiot yourself. Congrats!
This is the silliest propaganda website I’ve come across in a while. All of this supercilious talk from an obscure classics professor and his lackeys despserately pleading with everyone to love and never forget the classics are the best thing since slice bread is pathetic.
Ok sheeple, respond!I am looking forward to it!
Patriot, your intellectual superiors are quite finished with you. I understand your under-developed character and overweening pride plead otherwise, but if you should write further I shall not reply, because you are not of the sharpest, as is apparent.
I’ll put this in a monosyllable you can understand. SCRAM. You’re boring. I’d even lace it with an expletive so that it might sound more roundly in your wheelhouse, but I choose to observe the standards of this site.
Imagine that — standards! Ye gods.
That’s the way there, young genius, show the world the callipygian wonders of your form. But my advice would be don’t get into trouble so that you end up in prison. The inmates have a lot of ideas about appreciating that part of the anatomy.
Sounds like you speak from experience – and probably enjoyed it.
“The next day they sailed, and as the cruiser steamed slowly out to sea a tall man, immaculate in white flannel, and a graceful girl leaned against her rail to watch the receding shore line upon which danced twenty naked, black warriors of the Waziri, waving their war spears above their savage heads, and shouting farewells to their departing king.”
Sorry, the only Virgil I know is Finlay.
Good, but try Ruden; she’s great!
The Waziri live in Waziristan, deep in the mountains of north Pakistan. They have never seen the ocean, have no conception of it, and have never waved to anybody over it.
Tell that to Tarzan.
Gee, Patriot, I’m impressed. You wear your lack of education (and the resulting deep inferiority complex) like a badge of honor.
Since the entire discourse is so far outside of the realm of legitimately acceptable ideas and literature (as defined for you by your masters in the MSM and the Progressive clergy), perhaps you would find comfort in a less alienating environment, such as any of the George Soros sponsored sites, or perhaps a Joy Behar discussion forum. There, you would be in your element, with you and your fellow progressive comrades constantly reasurring each other of their innate moral and intellectual superiority stemming from adherence to your religion…..ahem, excuse me – belief system, and where your lack of broad education, highly restricted esposure to ideas, rigid conformity to the orthodoxy of leftist canon, and vitriolic rejection of any data or concept which does not strictly conform with your creed is violently excoriated for the heresy and lack of “Correct Thought” that it is.
I do sincerely hope that you are able to find the peace and tranquillity you so clearly seek by frequenting a sufficiently orthodox Progressive blog, where ignorance is a supreme virtue, so that you may avoid further doctrinal contamination and forever avoid the fear of isolation and the terrifying loneliness of logic, reason and analysis that Thinking imposes on weak minds, as Progressive clerics soothe your troubled thoughts by telling you what to do, think and feel.
And please forgive me if I chuckle at you – I just can’t help it. ;-)
“…your masters in the MSM and the Progressive clergy….”
You simply cannot make this stuff up! Must be read to be believed. And with Stallion’s logorrhea, there’s plenty to read.
I can’t say I’ve read Tacitus, but having read some Sophocles and seeing how VDH compares Nixon to Oedipus I am not terribly keen on his endorsement.
Any reading of Oedipus Rex where the phrase “tragic flaw” is other than a joke is absurd. Oedipus suffers not for any flaw inherent to himself, but because some olympian bastard* deserving of more calumnies than I care to type damned him through a delphine prophecy given before his birth. Any flaws he has are incidental to the grinding wheels of a malicious prophecy. Exactly the way Nixon’s flaws weren’t.
And that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in VDH’s comparisons to works I haven’t read.
* in both the literal and figurative senses
Just a few gentle suggestions:
“1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.”
Couldn’t agree more! Unfortunately, it’s a joke at PJM. There used to be a guideline about hate speech, but it was dropped when they realized that most of the blogs and comments – especially those dealing with Muslims – would have to be deleted.
Honey, Shhh – the PeeWee Playhouse forum is not here. You’re on a forum for grown-ups. Now go and play with your toys, that’s a good little feller…..
Hear! Hear!
I am no scholar of Ancient Greece, or well read for that matter, but even I could recognised the similarity of Bill Clinton to Alcibiades.
So here we are, in a state of regress, as you said, with absolutely no excuses. We have many examples from recorded history of the fall of other civilizations. It has happened so many times it is almost a cliche. What is the average lifespan of a Republic? 150 years? The solutions are so obvious and relatively easy, in comparisson to the pain and sacrifice that it took to create our wonderful country. But alas, politically impossible. This slow motion train wreck is a little like being in a Twilight Zone episode, condemned to repeat the same mistakes dictated by our human nature day after day, century after century. Yeat’s gyres come to mind.
So, on with the bread and circus. Don’t like Obama? No prob Bro. You can vote for Obama Lite. Same great flavor without the bitter aftertaste.
Funny. I’ve always liken Newt Gingrich to Alcibiades. Most people don’t get that reference though.
Newt does have some of the elements of that personality type but I give Bill Clinton the edge because of his creepy need to be loved by everyone. I got the impression that Alcibiades craved the same respect that flowed naturally to Pericles but could never really measure up. I see that insecurity in Bill Clinton but not in Newt.
Bill Clinton seems similar to Alcibiades in some ways but he falls far short. Alcibiades died fighting, surrounded by enemies who dared not come close. They finished him off with missiles. He was a fighter. Clinton was a shameless draft-dodger.
Wonderful post, albeit very sad to contemplate.
I used to think that the intelligent innovators would keep our society afloat, despite the pervasive ignorance among the easily-distracted and hopelessly delusional public.
But the ignorance has seeped into the mass media and the halls of government, and it has assumed a life of its own. I am not optimistic that we will continue to have the means to perpetuate innovation. The idiocracy will inherit the earth.
I think you give ‘the public’ too little credit. There is no ‘the public’ just as there is no ‘the masses.’ It’s no easy matter to undo the effects of the terrible education we get these days, requiring the unlearning all sorts of falsehoods imbibed in childhood. Despite the difficulty, many, indeed many millions, are doing just that, digging back in and finding the marvelous world denied to us by the petite-fascists. Those you refer to in positions of power suffer the same weakness that Obama demonstrates so clearly–the inability to learn. Just think of how tragic a thing it is to learn nothing new after the teenage years. Not to say that there is no additional information absorbed, but no new concepts, no challenge to old beliefs, simply an inability to see anything outside the Marx-approved box. I’m in my forties and still haven’t finished overcoming my miseducation; I’m reading Plutarch for the first time right now, and I have a huge list of other works I still have to get through. Time’s the killer, and the brain gets tired after ten or eleven hours of work, but bit by bit I (and millions of others) can still build a little more knowledge and understanding. No doubt there are plenty of extremely ignorant people around (and we import more every day) but the home-school and charter school movements are having their effect, and in many ways things are getting better at the same time as they’re getting worse.
As far as technology goes, being able to carry 10,000 books around on my Nook is a plain marvel.
“Those you refer to in positions of power suffer the same weakness that Obama demonstrates so clearly–the inability to learn.”
I think it is more the unwillingness to even see a need to learn and I think it is a product of our unheard of mass prosperity. Beginning with my generation, the ‘Boomers, no matter your family’s station in life, if you went to college, and it was easy to go and you didn’t have to be smart, and then went on to a job in government, education, the media or entertainment, or the burgeoning non-profit and interest group sector, you could spend your whole life surrounded by people just like yourself and comfortably keep the same stupid ideas you had sitting cross-legged smoking dope in a college dorm in 1969. We’re now on the third generational cohort of people like that and the November ’08 election proved that they have become a majority.
In distinctive, if not true Art fashion, you can take a valid insight and puff it up to the point of your own endlessly self-referential absurdity. Almost everyone, whether a government flunkey (like yourself) or an educational flunkey like me, or an entrepreneur has to face certain realities of some competition for advancement, raising children, preparing those children to compete, the aging of one’s parents and one’s self, watching various administrations rise and fall, political movements ebb and flow etc. Sometimes one (whether of the left or the right) stays with the value system they believed, or thought they believed when they were young, and sometimes they don’t. Being composed of humans, the other side always has an endless supply of things to criticize or mock. I’m sure that the upcoming Nightline with Newt’s ex-wife, two days before the SC primary will supply a few more things.
In undistinctive but expected Dwight form, you once again get it wrong. I’ve worked with and for these people and with an for the organizations that represent the government and education cohort; I know them pretty well. There are minor exceptions as is in my experience the case with all things human, but the mass is homogenous. Public employees below the managerial level engage in groupthink. At the lower levels it is mostly an us against them populism; the have nots against the haves, the powerless against the powerful. At the higher levels it is an us for us or us because we’re better elitism. There is very little competition in their lives; live long enough and you get the next job. The only thing you have to do to go from Widgetmaker I to Widgetmaker IV is avoid controversy and stay alive. If you want to advance faster going to the right cocktail party or giving good head is the ticket. And you may have been a flunky, I wasn’t.
You spend a lot of time groaning about the non-literate folks you had to deal with in later years. Well, I was turning out fairly literate ones who had had their feet held to the fire of the canon, and my teachers were patted and prodded to do likewise. Certainly, we knew which side our bread was buttered on when it came to improving our salaries and benefits, and such was pretty much straight self-interest, but when that came into conflict with the pursuit of excellence, I usually, not always, sided with excellence. I stood up at a union meeting and exhorted them to spend more time pushing excellence and its rewards over defending the weak, often incompetent sisters. Once I became an administrator, I continued down that path. It was an honest job and accomplished some things.
As a retiree, I can see more how the funding of government and its benefits, at some point, becomes a math problem. You have to be able to finance what you are doing, but there are so many creative ways of financing and kicking as many cans as possible down the road (and business does it too) that things are not at all clear in my mind, beyond my nominal 4-4-4 or 2-2-2 nostrums.
As for more good retirement talk, here you are:
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
Well, Dwight, somebody out there who calls him/herself an educator is turning out functional illiterates with really high GPAs. Even most of the lawyers were essentially trade-school graduates with some knowlege of the law, but little of anything else; they’d had the GERs in the first two years, so they had a little more than high school in liberal arts, and the rest was just the undergraduated version of what they would get in law school.
Fortunately, I had little to do with the National Extortion Association, they only represented a very small group of our employees. I found them to be lousy at collective bargaining but really, really good at buying school boards and showing up at Democrat conventions.
Loved your comment!
Yes, I’m 50+ and still reading, with lots of things “saved” till now (or when I get to them)–whole plays of Shakespeare, and lots of English poetry, since it wasn’t fashionable or something to teach it in my school days; I read Latin poetry before I knew much about English poetry (thus I’m left to be self-taught, which is OK).
One stays too long on the Internet (even here!), one stares too long at the TV; nothing–well, except maybe listening to opera!–beats reading. Take heart–one becomes a better reader over time. I’ve been astonished to realize that my reading of French has vastly improved over the decades, even though I’ve never been able to do it consistently. Apparently, you become a good-enough reader in one or more languages (my Latin’s OK, since I teach it these days), and it enhances your ability to read one you used to study long ago.
I don’t like the devices, though; for me, nothing beats the physical book.
“…shared ideas and learning trump age, race, class, gender….” True! Here’s some solid empirical evidence to support your claim.
One of my graduate students in a Master’s degree program, a teacher specializing in teaching English as a second language, got the local tractor manufacturing company to donate $1,000 worth of children’s picture books to an inner-city pre-school she volunteered in. Each week the children would take home any book they wanted and the next week, bring it back in exchange for another one. She worked with the children’s parents (immigrants), encouraging them to either read the book in English to their children or, if their own English was inadequate, to turn the pages and tell the story to the child in their native language. Over a six-month period, the teacher surveyed the parents in person to get their responses. The 50 children and their parents spoke 13 different languages.
Neither my grad student nor I anticipated this particular response from the parents. They said, “Because we all read the same books, we now feel we are part of a community!”
So simple, and so great. Thanks for sharing that anecodote!
I learned the phrase “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee…” from a cheesy early-1990s PC game called “Scorched Earth.” I recently used the phrase at work and one of my collegues identified the phrase as it was used in the movie _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_. And even more recently I learned the true origin of the phrase as I listened on my way to work an audio CD of _Moby Dick_.
Serendipitous, then, that I followed a trail of bread crumbs from contemporary to classic without realizing I was doing so.
It would have been better perhaps if I had read the classic first rather than playing the video game; I’ll offer it’s tough to read a classic with friends around!
Hilarious! Maybe there is hope in this e-world and gaming culture.
A friend of mine once referenced the quote about revenge being a dish best eaten cold as coming from the Klingons in Star Trek III or IV (I forget which). I was the one who bore the bad news that the writer stole it from the Balkans, where it’s been in use for centuries!
Even the best writers base their work on something. One of my bugaboos these days is the phrase (attached to a movie) “Based on a True Story.” All fiction is based on a true story…it’s where writers get their inspiration.
I’m feeling distinctly old here, having recognized the quotations cited in WOK from my own boyhood reading. (Yes, I read “Moby Dick” at age six, and was reading history before that.)
I was amused that the screenwriters (including director Nicholas Meyer) had Khan miscredit the Klingons with the “revenge” quote. But on reconsideration, I came to the conclusion that a culture like theirs (equal parts Japanese samurai and Mongol horsemen) would probably have come up with that sentiment much as the Earth originators did. (The Mongols had the same saying, probably evolved independently from the Balkan version.)
Since Khan was established as being well-read in the classics in the original TV episode (witness his reference to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” at the end of same), I give Meyer & Co. credit for remaining true to the original conception of the character.
Although he really should have paid more attention to Confucius, who said “When setting out upon a course of revenge, first dig two graves”.
cheers
eon
Actually, if you watch the original Star Trek series, and the movies with the original crew, you’ll find that the episodes and movies are full of quotes from Shakespeare, the Bible, etc.
As do the classic Loony Tunes…
And the accompanying music, which I would deduce, was done live to the animation is not only classically chosen, but adapted to each cartoon.
Does it get any better than Looney Toons!? It’s creators must have been not only well read, but well rounded – music, science, history and we could go on.
Indeed, it’s difficult to hear Ride of the Valkyries without thinking “Kill the Wabbit” or Powerhouse without picturing an animated assembly line.
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection series was released as a box set last month. 24 DVDs worth of shorts. Uncensored at that.
Sometimes the best discoveries of literature come from unusual initial inspirations. I saw the movie “The Warriors” as a young teenager and it captured my imagination. Years later, I discovered there was a novel written by Sol Yuric in the 1960s with the same title, and then discovered the novel was based on Xenophon’s Anabasis. So from a late 70′s movie to one of history’s great adventure tales in three steps (and about 5 years :) ).
Thanks – from the newly re-inspired to read.
I’m going to ignore my urge to proof read, because this article hit so many points I’ve spent so much time thinking about. I don’t think I’ll stop missing Christopher Hitchens any time soon – even when he was far-afield, he was a pleasure to read and he made me think (and made me mad) every time. Reading is the greatest pleasure I’ve ever had, and finding others who share it is a great solace.
Life becomes deeper when we read.
That was lovely, Dianna, and expresses exactly why reading has always been so important to me. I, too, mourn the loss of Mr. Hitchens and his wonderful writing. And while I covet an e-reader (specifically an I-Pad), I’ll never give up the physical presence of my library. It’s traveled with me through many moves, requiring the packing and unpacking of hundreds of books. Good thing my patient husband has a strong back! I’ve tried to weed it out, unsuccessfully since I can’t bear parting with old friends. It contains books I’ve owned for over forty years and when I open them they bring back memories of what I was doing when I first read them.
Whenever anyone I know asks me – always in a mystified tone – why I bother reading ancient literature, I either show them the first paragraph of Xenophon’s “Persian Expedition” or I relate to them the story, told by Livy, of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Hannibal meeting up in Turkey before Rome’s war against Antioch for control of Asia Minor.
They don’t start reading the classics, but at least it makes them understand.
On the bright side:
Ever since the Roman Empirium collapsed, there have ALWAYS been very few people who read the ancient authors. Nevertheless, they find a small readership in every age and era. Perhaps we are lamenting a phenomenon that has been with us for 1500 years – which would indicate that it’s nothing to worry about.
:-)
Your rebuttal, or should I say, written slayings of the alleged patriot above, have me in stitches. You must be well read to be able to write like that!!
They were read by very few when they were contemporary. I think that is the magic of the World of the printing press and now the electronic media; that which was produced and consumed for an elite few is readily available to the mass. My only difficulty with the Roman writers, and I’ve read most of the popular canon at the survey level at least, is that since they were writing for a social and economic elite, they’re a lot like reading the New York Times writing about George W. Bush. Likewise, reading a lot of the history of the Eastern Roman Empire is almost all through a very unfriendly Roman Catholic lens. We would understand the modern world and especially our troubles with the Mohammedans a lot better if we had a more objective understanding of the government that went on for a thousand years after the “fall” of the Western Roman Empire and held out against the Muslim onslaught for over 700 years.
Reading underpins understanding. In my world ‘twitter’ is sound of my birds in the bottle-brush tree at 5am in the morning. No reading equals no culture evolving. Our own future is dependent on the new generation readers – and in my future they will come.
To quote Euclid, ‘there’s no royal road to geometry…’
We live in a soundbite world, without a real thirst for knowledge, wisdom, experience, of leaving a lasting legacy – all we have is the fleeting present. At 40 characters a time, quality learning won’t come fast or easy. The classics require patience and effort – and the benefits are lifelong and many. The lack of critical thinking today worries me greatly.
Brilliantly written Dr. Hanson. I consider myself truly privileged to be able to regularly read a modern day Cicero such as yourself.
I have also long thought that we fool ourselves with our technology into thinking that we also have wisdom. Filling every schoolroom in America with the latest and fastest computers achieves absolutely zero in increasing our children’s collective knowledge and wisdom. The problem with education isn’t lack of money. It’s a lack of blackboards and chalk and teachers with a mastery of their subject and the desire to pass it on. That is all education costs. The rest is payola to the power brokers and unions.
I like to amuse myself with the thought that as suffistikated and eryoudite as we think we are, we are as easily led around by the nose as that crowd in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, clamoring to burn the witch.
Thank you for your paean to the love of reading and the wisdom it brings.
But don’t forget the witch’s final line:
“It’s a fair cop!”
To make a distinction that you seem to imply, technology is not a substitute, rather it’s a complimentary tool. As seen as the latter, there are significant gains to be had – my own son has begun reading, writing, and simple math, and he’s still in kindergarten. I credit that to his teachers, and stay very involved with him myself, such that I know that when he’s playing with his leappad, tracing letters, or math centred games, and then can see his activity when the device is linked to the leap frog website, that on the contrary technology provides tremendous upside for the learning process.
That said, I hear you in so far as it’s not the primary component. I just wanted to add, that it can truly increase the rate of learning, and strongly believe that as an educational tool, the learning process is going to be remarkable over the next few decades.
And these same reasons apply, as to why one should spend a few minutes read Peerless Prof. Hanson’s columns each week!
Mr Hanson has listed several good reasons for reading. The one that he left out is “reading makes you happy”. Show me a bunch of surly malcontents and I’ll show you a group of non-readers.
I have a friend who is a surly malcontent. He’s an English Major.
Yes…and probably does not read anything not assigned in class.
Or only reads what is assigned in class. The happy reader label only applies to people who read for enjoyment or the personal pursuit of knowledge.
Yes, but does he read?
And the surly malcontents who are revolutionaries? Lu Xun and his friends certainly count among both classics and surly malcontents. Even Socrates seems a bit surly to me, corrupting the youth of Athens. And who could claim that Kropotkin is both not surly and not well read? Looking at the modern day, Chomsky seems to be very well read, and quite surly.
For many youth, I would agree with the statement “Show me a bunch of surly malcontents and I’ll show you a group of non-readers,” but lets remember that generalities are nothing more than that, and they do not apply to 100% of the population. Exceptions abound, no?
Yes of course exceptions can be found. But I enjoyed writing that sentence.
Yes: it was a good line. :)
I read a page, in a recent year, by Reynolds Price in the Duke magazine about how unread his students had become and was driven to write him a letter hoping that his despair would not, ultimately, define the future. I received no reply but I find myself reading this piece and seeing more of the same.
I do believe that the “classical education” is withering on the vine and, unlike grapes which can leave us with delicious raisins, these will just be dessicated, embittered fruits which nourish no one or no thing.
Like Mitt Romney felt sorry for that woman having to defend Obama’s record, the truth is we should all feel sorry for the mass of people leading LOUD lives of desperation, who don’t read great books.
Indeed, there’s your GAP—my spiritual master DEMANDED we all had to read from ANY religion, as well as his own sacred words.
We should all also spend time daily meditating.
Thinking, thinking, thinking—-a terrible thing to always do!
I would never have read so much of the Fathers if there hadn’t been an Internet; and I never would have realized Socrates was enjoyable (instead of boring) and the great epics gripping poetry (instead of just kinda interesting) without audiobooks. It’s crazy that, just when we have so many ways to educate ourselves, so many people have been deprived of the desire and the ideal of it.
You make a GREAT point. I’ve never sat in a Victor Davis Hanson lecture, but I’m sure he brings history to life. Our education system is chalk full of boring, bureaucratic education majors who go through the teaching motions, but have no passion for what they are doing. If they don’t appreciate Socrates, and worse, if their liberal bias makes them antithetical to anything Western Civilization, how can they pass on anything but contempt to their students?
We believed that the Internet would bring all the world to us. Sady though, for many it has had the opposite effect.
Limiting ourselves to conversing with those who think like us and like and hate only the things we do, the Internet has made the whole world as small as ourselves.
“Limiting ourselves to conversing with those who think like us and like and hate only the things we do, the Internet has made the whole world as small as ourselves.”
Keep in mind that you are responsible for that. You are perfectly able to seek out and consume conflicting narratives. You are able to engage with people who hold differing opinions. One can hardly blame the internet for one’s own lack of desire to seek out new experiences.
Speak for yourself. We’ve been able to order just about any book we want from the Amazon Marketplace: Didache, Eusebius’ Martyrs in Palestine, one of our three copies of the Aeneid (we need a card catalogue, maybe?). Google an author, and there it is.
Learned to read. Magic.
Read to learn. Also magic.
Where’s the ‘like’ button ;-)
One of the benefits of the spread of e-readers is that the old classics are largely free. I just read “The Three Musketeers” with much pleasure. The classics generally make modern books look like drivel.
The e-readers are terrific. They make accessing a library virtual. The downside is in sharing a book with others – there isn’t one to pass along – and, it’s tough to make notes in the margin of an e-reader, or mark up pages (but that will undoubtedly be added, if it’s not already a feature of e-readers).
And as for a book, and the speed of turning a physical page, and leafing through the contents and entire pages, is a process difficult to imagine ever being duplicated by technology.
Both have their milieu’s and will more likely complement the degree of reading rather than be exclusive in the result, imho.
I have only a hazy idea of why most people have iPhones and play video games. If I feel that way, and I manage digital image files, my own website’s code and graphic software, what does that tell you about the complete worthlessness of such things?
Since that vast majority of people don’t manage image files, write XHTML or use Illustrator, why do they indulge in these shiny things other than because they’re shiny?
I hate Kindle – I read books, with pulp. I like the smell and I don’t need tech to do it. When I need a battery charger to read that’s a problem.
VGs, internet, music, they give you instant stimuli. I even squirm around sometimes when there’s nothing left to click on for that moment’s pleasure. But a book? Not so. The reader has to do the mental work, and think about meaning to derive it’s reward.
“…complete worthlessness of such things.”
Possibly the most ignorant and parochial statement yet made in this discussion. Equating a lack of personal interest in a medium with an objective evaluation of “worthlessness” for that medium is myopic and frankly retrograde.
The value of any given work is independent of that work’s medium. Virgil does not become stupid or worthless if I am reading it on an e-reader; my mind does not fail to process Socrates because his words are displayed on an LCD screen. You might as well argue that /true/ scholars only read the classics on parchment.
You did not properly parse what I wrote: I obviously stated I was on board with tech, tech that I could see an end use for that was unique and specific.
There is nothing parochial about what I said. I was evaluating a system that is unique as opposed to one that is simply a different delivery system. Of course Virgil is good despite the medium – well, that includes paper too and requires no miniature infrastructure about my person or energy other than my fingers.
I have 1,800 songs on iTunes. That is because it is convenient. But gadgets are still gadgets and all these iPhones and iPads are really used as toys and little else – shiny toys. XHTML is not a shiny toy but a tech that is useful. Digital photography has its obvious good points.
Playing around on an iPhone mailing pix of a walleye you just fried or your cat yawning or even worse, playing video games is not a plus in life.
I never sit around thinking: wow, when I was a kid I wish I could’ve sent my uncle in Bangladesh a photo of a walleye 1 hour after I caught it. I wish I had a Kindle instead of books, I wish I didn’t have to actually go outside.
It is taken for granted that these things collectively make your life better: I bet I could make an equal argument that they make your life more empty without having to be seen as a provincial Luddite.
Since I have slept on live volcanoes perfectly happy to be all alone with a full moon and cut off from the world, and sat on top of La Dante temple in the middle of a roadless jungle at dawn while howler monkeys cried in the fog, no case can be made for me being parochial but for you being an unwitting inhabitant of “The Machine Stops.”
When you can tell me the non-deprecated way to center a web page using 1.0 Strict, then maybe you will look less like a lucky monkey picking up shiny rocks than someone actually embracing the very tech I in fact do. There is moving upwards and moving sideways and moving backwards.
What a cool guy. We’re blessed that you’ve taken the time out from your busy schedule to speak to us lowly mortals about how badly we’re doing it wrong.
I didn’t say anyone was doing anything wrong. I was expressing my own value system and point of view. Sorry you find that threatening.
See you atop the “Navel of the World” at 3,000 meters with a full moon; that’s Agung Volcano to you chump. And don’t forget a reading comprehension book.
On Kindle. Or as I call it, “wasting time til you die.”
I’m sure there’s some volcanic vent we can plug it into.
I have a simpler version John: “go outside.”
I thought I would hate the kindle, too. But I got one for Christmas last year, and then found Google books. They’ve digitized a lot of public domain books in the great university libraries. Things I would never have had access to in my little country town I can now download and read as PDF files on the kindle. I think it’s great!
When I first went to college, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I saw all the neat stuff in the library. Now I have easy access to 10 times that amount. I love it!
Setting out on a three-week vacation, driving half-way across the country, I’m delighted that I can bring along 250+ books from which to choose to read during rest stops, before sleeping, etc.
All of which fits in a shirt pocket.
There’s a time for paper, there’s a time for backlit pixels.
They’re selling books on Amazon for 1 cent – thanks for the assist.
There is more than content in books – there are tip-ins, molded covers, the smell, limited editions, autographed editions; try giving your kid a flash drive with 1,000 books on it and see how nostalgic he waxes for that kind of artistry. Kindles lack incense.
God I hope not. Nothing quite like the smell of fresh print.
Santa recently brought me, at me behest :) a Nook, just the simple e-reader version, not the fancy schmancy kind. I’m a technofile and I have most of the latest gadgets, but I was somehow against the e-reader. The thing is, I was spending a lot of time reading online, but since I’ve gotten my Nook, my book reading has increased again. Oddly enough that you mention Gibbon, as that was one of the first purchases I made as I was stacking my Nook with the classics that I enjoyed on my shelf. All of Cicero’s letter compiled into one easy to read e-book. Classic science fiction like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, war biographies like So Sad to Fall in Battle, and War as I Knew It. Now, whatever my literary mood, there is also something in my library to read, and it’s all right there in my backpack.
As someone else said, our society poo poos literacy, it’s not technology that’s the problem, it’s attitude. What’s the age old cliché, you can lead a horse to water, etc, etc. I know plenty of people that could sleep in a room that was wall to wall classics and they may as well be invisible for all the attention they’ll receive.
I have a kindle and ever since I got it, I can’t help but notice how many people have one (or another e-reader) and they read voraciously as they wait in the doctor’s office, or dentist’s office, or while waiting to get their car serviced etc. Having my kindle gives me free access to so many classics. I’ve decided to read St. Augustine’s Confessions this Lent.
We’ve been picking up used classics $.25 at a time since we were married 22 years ago, including Confessions. I noticed last summer that one of the older kids picked it up off a bookshelf and read it for a while. Tiptoed through the room like a butterfly was on my shoulder. I wonder if that would happen if it were in Kindle form.
Dr., I don’t generally have much to add to your thoughtful discussions of modern events, but I must chime in on your plea to recall the classics – just as Syme in Orwell’s 1984 bragged about his ministry’s goal of actually reducing the number of available words used to express thought, we as a society do indeed seem determined to pronounce ourselves the superior inheritors of all history, without a thought to how the words of the past reflect the experiences of today.
I recently started in on a collection of Poe’s short stories – if he is recalled at all, it is usually as the author of “The Raven”, or “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and nothing else. I implore the curious reader to try out “The murders at the Rue Morgue” – while it is a terrific detective-story yarn, the beginning contains a tremendous philosophical discussion by way of introducing the narrator’s friend and colleague (Poe’s gift seemed to include setting up another character in his stories – never himself – who was the truly brilliant one).
Or try on for size almost any of Henry Rider Haggard’s novels of adventures, often in deepest Africa: while today’s politically-correct scholar will reflexively denounce Haggard’s entire body of work as the very core of colonialism, imperialism, and racism, he will miss out on an author whose characters were highly sympathetic, benevolent, and kind, especially where their African hosts were concerned.
Meanwhile, for pure comedy in literature, look within Haggard’s “Allan Quatermain”, where an African warrior, Omslapagaas, offers a lengthy treatise on why his beloved axe is named after a woman – the three analogical points he offers to explain this convention caused me to burst out laughing, and such richly layered thought, is, I fear, nowhere to be found in modern-day literature of any sort, doomed, I am sure, to denunciation by those of us who look at everything in the past as though it were to be judged by the lens of the present. Such is our Intellectual malady today, exactly as you have described, Dr. hanson.
Poe’s and Haggard’s works that I have cited above are now available for free download, and I indeed made these discoveries on a Kindle – so perhaps there is yet hope that our modern technology may find a way to connect to the wisdom of the past.
Thank you very much for that much-needed discussion.
Reading is the secret to all intelligence.
Dr. Hanson isn’t just comparing apples and oranges; he’s conflating them. Modern Americans read for many reasons, chiefest among them entertainment. Ironically, when the great books of yore were written, very few books were being written — and they were being read by very few persons, a condition that continued well into the Eighteenth Century. Moreover, the function of those books, in their readers’ eyes, was to entertain them, not to overawe them with insight or linguistic acumen.
When education became widely available to persons outside the nobility, the books that dominated curricula were precisely those great books — the Bible; Shakespeare; Homer and Virgil; the fables of Aesop — whose production preceded that era. But simultaneously, the accumulation of wealth and leisure made it possible for more writers to write more books, and to see them distributed to an ever-widening readership. So the classics acquired competition for readers’ time, and inasmuch as the principal reason to read was still for entertainment, the newer writers, being more in touch with the milieu of their readers, had an edge!
When commentators of our time press the classics on contemporary readers, they invariably do so wrongheadedly. They emphasize the quality of those hoary old greats — and make no mistake, among them are gems that remain unequaled by any book of our time. But people with leisure time and the inclination to read still do so principally to entertain themselves. Delight; diversion; perhaps an incidental dollop of edification. Therefore, we cannot be persuaded to immerse ourselves in Tacitus or Plautus by a claim that it would be “good for us.”
Should we be more interested in the classics than we are today? That depends on the answers to several other questions:
– Are the classics more eloquent and articulate than contemporary books?
– Do the classics have more to teach us about human life and human nature than books being written by contemporary authors?
– Are the classics sufficiently entertaining to a modern reader that he’ll be able to persuade himself to “hang in there” for their lessons?
The last thing anyone should want is to flog modern readers into the classics, and have him come away bored or disgusted, and thus armored against subsequent suggestions that those old gems have great and unappreciated virtues. Remember always the puckish definition of a “classic,” produced, I believe, by Ambrose Bierce:
Verbum sat sapienti.
Great insight Francis. I agree.
Francis, that is a very thought-provoking analysis as far as it goes. However, I disagree that the chief motive for reading is entertainment in the sense of idle amusement. At the time ancient works were written they were read (not widely as you astutely observe) for information. Reading for knowledge was then and continues to be entertaining, and the “classics” continue to be a rich source of knowledge. Writings through the ancient, post western Roman, “dark” and middle ages, medieval, etc. up to today are not just yesterday’s examples of contemporary literature. They are each part of history and, to those of us who read them today, enlightening and entertaining in ways and on levels that modern literature is not and that they were not to the periods that produced them. Before wide-spread reading and mass production of books, most such works are accounts of events, things, and places; reaction to events, things, and places; and thoughts and philosophy that arise from life and events then. They have an intellectual intent and appeal different in quality and usefulness from modern day trashy novels, exposes, and biographies of pop stars. They also are very important to understanding history. For example, I do not know what would be the modern version of works by Gregory of Tours or the Venerable Bede, but one gets from them through their small keyhole a vivid sense of life in that important formative period of history. One can gain a deeper insight into today’s events from those and others of ancient lineage. I agree that one should not flog people into reading classics for the sake of saying they have been read. But it is extremely important for us all that more people become inspired to find that learning about everything is very entertaining and a satisfying source of amusement. I am very optimistic that the human mind drives more people in that direction than might appear. The wonderful result of the classics being in the popular domain is that, ironically, they are probably more readily and cheaply available than ever before because of the web’s insatiable hunger for content. Once again, thanks for your useful thoughts.
But, part of the “problem” of all the written garbage, is that the peasants are literate. Instead of watching hangings or Christians being fed to lions they read “Mean Girls” and watch Disney sitcoms.
We don’t need more technocrats who fool us that their Ivy League law degrees are synonymous with wisdom. They can be, but now are more likely not much more than tickets that allow an Eric Holder or Timothy Geithner into the first-class seating.
A brilliantly witty line in a brilliant essay. Thank you.
Actually I’m re-reading Gibbons’ “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” right now. It’s tedious at times, but the stretch of history described is awesome in scope and thought-provoking in making one draw unwilling comparisons to events today.
You might enjoy this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEI0JQ/ref=docs-os-doi_0
It’s a look at the end of the Roman Empire with about 200 more years of archeology and study that Gibbon had benefit of.
I got the 6 volume set of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” for Christmas, and I’ve found that it helps to already have an encyclopedic knowledge of Roman history–which I don’t have–before tackling it.
Unlike a typical history book, it rarely mentions anything as pedestrian as, say, dates. :-)
I loved Gibbon as well. However, I recommend you round it out with Toynbee’s history of civilization. It will shake you to the core. A truly impressive work, one of the greatest accomplishments of literature.
Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru is massively cool and massively footnoted. He puts amateurs like W.E.B. Dubois to shame.
When I was in catholic high school I would enter a classroom where an older kindly priest would begin our lesson on reading Vergil in Latin. In the middle of a blue collar neighborhood surrounded by factories and clanging streetcars I would find myself reading those immortal words that start “arma virum que cano” and marvel at the fact that I was reading words which were written two thousand years ago. I continued my studies in Latin and eventually became a Latin teacher and instructed others and introduced them to the classical world. This introduction to Virgil had saved me from the modern Americanized world and to this day I can find no better expression of the humanities; when Vergil wrote about the “dolor rerum” in Book VI I was able to understand the everyday sorrows and struggles of life. Today very few students in the Americanized world read or study Latin; many of them have only a cursory knowledge of English. We do live in a savage age. I still have an inscription above my study :scripta verba manent” When I retired the public school where I worked dropped Latin. I recalled a scene from an Evelyn Waugh novel where the Latin master who had been away to fight the war returns to his school and is told that Latin and the classics had been dropped. The headmaster tells him that the parents want to prepare their sons for the modern world and you cannot really blame them. The Latin master says ” I can and do blame them; I think that it is a very terrible thing to prepare a boy for the modern world.”
‘verba volant, scripta manent’
Both the tiny, rural high school in “flyover country” that I attended, and the large NoVA suburban high school my kids attend, offer Latin. Two of my children took AP Latin; each scored 750 or more on the verbal part of their SAT, so it has some practical value as well.
For five years I’ve had the immense privilege and pleasure of teaching Latin, including the AP level… and, as of next year, there’s a new AP Latin curriculum with much less Vergil, so as to make time for Caesar. Oh, of course there’s nothing wrong with Caesar (I predict lots of discussion of the first European genocide against the Gauls as we study about him), but spending a year reading as much of the Aeneid as possible has seemed like a great thing to do with cooperative and enthusiastic young people. Sunt lacrimae rerum, though…
Technology has deluded the modern West. We equate widespread knowledge of how to use an iPad with collective wisdom.
As I watch people use their gadgets I often wonder how many of them have any idea how they work. Sure, some kid can teach grandma or grandpa how to surf the Internet but do those kids have any idea what technologies drive their online shopping experience?
As I get older (I’m only 33) I’ve noticed more and more how things I thought of as “classics” aren’t, at least to the world at large. I’ve also noticed how thing “everyone” knew aren’t anymore. Even with pop culture a rarely used line from one of my favorite movies (“You’re right Ray, no human would stack books like this.”) was totally missed by dozens of younger folks much to my astonishment. Then there are the true classic lines that even more folks don’t get that completely baffle me.
Is reading dead? Hardly, but WHAT we read is more mainline entertainment than classic literature. I came out of the California public school system and I’ve read probably near zero what Mr. Hanson would believe I should have. In a way that saddens me, but at least I still have time to read. ;)
Ghostbusters of course.
Here’s one for you :
‘A man should not believe in an ‘ism’, he should believe in himself’.
I’m about twenty years older than you and I’ve noticed the same effect. It’s not that “people today don’t remember the stuff I used to like.” It’s that they don’t remember anything older than themselves. When I was a teen, I and most of my friends were able to understand cultural references from 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because it was “out there” – on TV and in movies, in music, in art, in advertising. We had the Warner Brothers, Tex Avery, Walt Disney, Bette Midler and the Pointer Sisters, Capt. Wild Bill Kelson, and even Ty Cobb’s Cheerleaders to keep us informed. So-called postmodern culture, which is supposed to gather bits and pieces from everywhere, doesn’t seem interested in anything over twenty years old. It’s weird.
Ditto. My generation grew up knowing about the Beatles, Howdy Doody, Dick Van Dyke, etc. Kids of the current generation don’t know the Goonies, Monster Squad, Mr Rogers, etc. You can’t make cultural references without getting a blank stare and then get treated like you’re the “dumb one” or “lame” for knowing about such old fashioned nonsense as what came out before these self-absorbed Narcissuses were born.
I have two comments: first, there is a vastly greater amount of content to be consumed now than there was 20 or 30 years ago, so in this sense youth now are victims of this rather than sinners by their own actions. Secondly, to play devil’s advocate, why should the younger generation care about something that is more than 20 years old? What makes knowing about Howdy Doody or Dick Van Dyke any better than knowing what youth commonly know?
What are classics change from culture to culture, with similar cultures having more overlap than distant cultures. In the same way that what is considered a classic in the United States and in China are two very different things, what is considered worthwhile by an 18 year old man and a 80 year year old man are very different things. Can we really say that one party’s opinion is worthwhile while the other’s is wrong? They are both rooted in and supported by a vast network of peers.
One view on learning history (I would call it the practical view as opposed to the romantic view) is that it is a way to understand the present: in this sense learning history that is more recent is more efficient and more effective, because it has a greater impact on the present (and on the future). I would much prefer to read so learn what the reasons and motives were for the armed conflicts in the past decade than for the struggle for power between Athens and Sparta. Although I may gain something applicable from reading a text from 2000 years ago, would I not gain more from reading one about the world as it still exists?
No actually.
Thou shalt read “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom lest thou become the “poster boy” for Bloom’s lament. Upon completing said tome you may be better able to put your mind in synch with what the Prof is saying.
But please do keep reading!
“..I and most of my friends were able to understand cultural references from 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because it was “out there” – on TV and in movies, in music, in art, in advertising.”
Well, becareful.. not everyone picks up on the references.
I recall a convesation with a female student at OSU in 95′ when she told me she slapped a guys face this weekend when he made a strange request. When I asked what did the offending party say, she told me, “we chatted at the bar and then asked me if I wanted to “cut a rug.” When I told her he was asking her for a dance she was mortified. She assumed it met something perverse.
greek mothers would make honey cookies in the shape of letters. The children would be enticed by the cookies, and learn their letters from the shapes.
A similar thing is happening today, right under our noses. Rick Riordan has written a series of books “percy jackson” and friends. The main character is a son of Poseidon. He’s a modern teenager, and his life is laced with classical references. It’s awful prose- I read it to the kids at bedtime, per their request- but it has a story! and a thought about the value of Western Civilization. I thought it was awful. Then, the boys in the first grade class started checking out books on greek myths. So little bitty tiny boys- so short they had to reach up to hug the teacher’s waist, at the end of the day- in spiderman teeshirts, and Target jeans, holding Star Wars lunchboxes- would be talking about Aphrodite and Athena and Ares and Bacchus- at the top of their lungs. And they’d read more than one, to compete with each other in the awesomeness. You don’t expect, in the middle of making Hamburger Helper dinner to be asked “So, the manticore has a lion’s face. Would it still be scary with a human face?” by some kid who can’t write his name in a straight line on a page.
In second grade, they’d figured out that Percy could read and write Greek. And the mom of one, wife of a seminary student, photocopied a page from her husband’s Greek textbook. And the kids started sending notes to each other in Greek letters. English words, Greek letters. The teachers pretended to not see these notes sticking out from between books, or under the hedgehog’s cage, or wherever else they put them.
The year after that, they started watching you, Mr Dr Hanson, on the History Channel. They kept it on near- looping repeat. I can hear you and your colleagues in my dreams. The gumby-looking young guy, the guy with the mustache, and you, all talking about greece, rome, battles, architecture, jericho. I don’t even know where all fifty states are, or even really, American history, so talking to me is water on stone…the kids can find the hydaspes river on a map, they can draw the hydaspes, they can draw fully-armed hoplites and legionaries, they joke about miltiades…
I’m still worried about laundry and dinner. Courtesy of the boys, we now have giant picture books on Rome and Greece, we have a decline and fall, we have your own Thucydides….
I don’t know about elsewhere, but Rick Riordan has inspired a great passion that can flower outward and onward. The past doesn’t seem to be a far country for them and their friends.
Twenty-some years ago, I overheard a conversation between two little boys in which one said, “I’ll be Michaelangelo; you be Raphael.” I was amazed to think their art teacher had made such an impact. Obviously, this was before I had children…or any awareness of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I like the depressing Lord Jim. I enjoyed Under Western eyes and Nostromo. The duel is a jewel and better than the overvalued but interesting heart of darkness . But Victory is unreadable. He circles once and again going nowhere like the 60 firsts pages of Lord Jim. The Secret Agent also is worthy of a reading.
Knut Hamsum has no interest out of America, there is better reading material in France or Russia.
O prefer thae Odissey to the Iliad but there are better ways to sell it. It is as gory as Titus with more sex
The internet giveth and taketh away. One can easily find Thoreau’s journals and letters, but just as easily cut and paste from them without completely absorbing the content. The following is from a letter to Blake in January of 1859, and makes a point with which many conservatives could agree:
I met Mr. [Henry] James the other night at Emerson’s, at an Alcottian
conversation, at which, however, Alcott did not talk much, being disturbed by
James’s opposition . The latter is a hearty man enough, with whom you can differ
very satisfactorily, on account of both his doctrines and his good temper. He
utters quasi philanthropic dogmas in a metaphysic dress; but they are for all
practical purposes very crude. He charges society with all the crime committed,
and praises the criminal for committing it. But I think that all the remedies he
suggests out of his head-for he goes no farther, hearty as he is-would leave us
about where we are now. For, of course, it is not by a gift of turkeys on
Thanksgiving
Day that he proposes to convert the criminal, but by a true
sympathy with each one,-with him, among the rest, who lyingly tells
the world from the gallows that he has never been treated kindly by a
single mortal since he was born. But it is not so easy a thing to sympathize
with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it. There is Dobson
over the hill. Have not you and I and all the world been trying, ever since he
was born, to sympathize with him? (as doubt- less he with us), and yet we have
got no farther than to send him to the House of Correction once at least; and
he, on the other hand, as I hear, has sent us to another place several times.
This is the real state of things, as I understand it, at least so far as James’s
remedies go. We are now,
alas! exercising what charity we actually have, and new laws would
not give us any more. But, perchance, we might make some improvements in the
House of Correction. You and I are Dobson; what will James do for us?
————–
A more challenging question is whether those of us so spend so much time, chatting so amiably here, would be better off using more of it and other internet time to exercise other portions of our brains.
People grumble that teachers don’t do x, or don’t do y, but some of them ARE fighting the good fight here. And if they are not, who is?
“How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation?”
Easy. FDR, LBJ, WJC, BHO. Foci of Bolshevik power grabs who held up the worst elements of the society as a template for the best.
You can’t sell it when the girl across the street gives it away for free. Ebonics will win every time.
I made a foray back into college back in the mid-’90s when I was in exile from the State government; guess the university is the modern equivalent of the monastery when you’re on the “king’s” bad side.
I observed that with the late teens, early twenties males that if you from most of them the words s**k, f**k, and f*g, they would only be able to grunt, point, and spit. They were incapable of conversing in standard academic or formal English, most could barely write a decent English sentence, and almost none had any grasp of writing a paragraph.
When I returned to the executive branch in ’99, for the first time in my working life I was no longer surrounded by a ‘Boomer cohort but rather twenty and thirty somethings. I was their supervisor and had to review their work, 90% of which went back to them looking as if I’d slit my wrists over it.
Not totally true on the video game front.
I played league play in Counter-Strike with my brother and friends; It was some of the best times of highschool, no joke. I learned discipline, dedication, teamwork, taking orders from someone 2 years my senior, and patience.
But yeah I’m guessing you are referring to the countless hours playing Halo or whatever the kids play now.
Recently I remarked to family and friends that I read **less** after getting a Kindle. I read more short stories and essays, but little complex, involved or truly stimulating. My sad trend is palapable while looking over my 2011 reading list, which is less robust than those from ’07 – ’10. However, I kicked the new year off right with a modern classic, Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and have many 18th and 19th century travelogues, essay collections, sermon collections and other literature ready to read on, er, my Kindle.
because, believe it or not, many classicists in the us as a rule don’t read much of anything else in literature at all, and don’t write or speak everyday demotic english well enough to fully appreciate their own language when they do read it, which means they can’t fully embrace their greek or latin either, however well schooled they are in them. When such bookish insularity combines with esoteric hauteur, classical languages and literature in their hands lose their color and vitality, and end up dead and antiquated.
An article on reading that begins with a reference to orally composed and transmitted poetry? No small bit of irony there. You do not mention Sappho. A recently discovered poem by her contrasts in important ways with what you say and cite about aging. But she too was also likely to have composed orally and hence it is fair to question whether she should merely be read rather than memorized, recited and performed. I think her poetry can be experienced by men and women today in a way that it never could have been before, constituting an example of how we do experience what has not happened before. Furthermore, thanks to technology I can offer an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WaQzFQhU0&list=PLF8890CA96536B874&index=1&feature=plpp_video
here is a great admirer of Sappho, namely, the ancient Roman poet, Catullus:
http://www.demosnews.com/piece.php?115.1
It’s as if he’s alive and kicking today!
“Reading alone enriches our vocabulary”
I usually enjoy reading Mr Hanson, but I confess I often must turn a blind eye towards a stuffiness and old man’s nostalgia which effuses his writing. It leads him to make clearly ridiculous conclusions such as the one I quoted above. Reading alone enriches our vocabulary? So an illiterate man cannot peak richly?
The vocabulary Hanson seems enamored with is that of Latin roots. Fine words, those Romance ones, but only a person with a small mind would think them somehow superior to the words that our language was built upon, the Anglo-Saxon word-stock that ring so true even today that the great writers such as Churchill revised their work to include a greater Saxon portion.
And this is to say nothing of the rich beauty of words that spring up today from all manner of culture ranging from the labs to the ‘hood.
Yes, we need to read more. No, it isn’t the only way to enrich one’s vocabulary. Beware the myopia of yearning for a distant and most likely nonexistent past world.
If one reads English, one is exposed to ALL the elements you mention. It is a monster language. Check out “The Story of English” by MacNeil and probably others; a very accessible history of the language.
Bought two eReaders in the last year or so and I’m down with more books that I have been in years, and I always have been a steady reader.
Nothing beats the plain printed word. I think electronic devices have people reading more. I see a review or a topic, I search, I look, I buy, many times at low cost or free. Or borrow.
Funny, I’ve found the New York Public Library’s site the least user-friendly.
I’ve never seen “semi-cola” or “cola” before as the plural of semicolon and colon. According to my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, only other definitions of “colon” (i.e., the large intestine, and a rhythmical unit in Greek or Latin verse, which is presumably where VDH picked it up) are made plural in this way; “colon” as a punctuation mark (:) is made plural as “colons” and “semicolon” (;) is made plural as “semicolons.”
As long as you don’t confuse words which change their meanings in the plural—hortus, garden but horti, park, for instance, or impedimentum, hindrance, but impedimenta, baggage—you may use classical plurals seriously or facetiously at any time without needing Webster’s approval. So, calm down; have a martinus with your pizzum.
All is not lost, Professor Hanson. There are a lot of people out here like your Fresno class, determined to keep our minds fed and alive. And technology is not necessarily an enemy. The internet, for instance, lets me read your essays and instantly look up names like Alcibiades, to learn something I didn’t know before. Ebooks give us access to books we might not have bothered with before (I hope you will consider making some of your works available to Kindle, in fact).
That said, primary education as it stands in America today is the greatest enemy of classical learning. I am appalled at the depths of ignorance in my grandchildren, and they are not stupid.
Sorry, Dr. Hanson, but this piece is a piece indeed … of you know what. Let me say it clearly, loudly: old literature is not inherently better than new and is often worse. I speak as a teacher and professor who has spent over 30 years teaching Shakespeare and other “greats.”
Shakespeare was great, but he was a blowhard, too. Nobody including Dr. Hanson reads him in private. One goes to his plays for ulterior motives: to impress a girl, to meet a course requirement, to be able to claim to other snobs that you’ve seen that play.
My wife and I recently embarked on a quest to watch all 37 of his plays. We’d seen or been to about ten before we started the experiment. I had taught about eight of them quite thoroughly. Outside of those eight, I wasn’t that familiar with many of them.
We are about halfway through our sojourn (and a sojourn it is, indeed) and I can say without equivocation, the guy could be a major wind-factory, a plot-stealer, and a man who wasn’t afraid to retell the same story twenty times. His comedies are basically all the same story.
A classroom is where Shakespeare should be read. Only there can one make real sense of him and even more, can look into the deep eloquence of some of his greater passages (like Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle” monologue) and really appreciate it. I can’t fathom the groundlings of his day, standing in the open area, understanding any of it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, Dr. H, but this is true of most of the classical canon: it is fodder for academia. Life’s too short to spend it feeling guilty about all the supposedly important stuff you’re supposed to read but haven’t … and won’t.
If Shakespeare and the Classics suck, what would you recommend we read instead?
I would be happy to give some recomendations.
Read these:
Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong
Apologies for the double post.
I would be happy to give some recomendations.
Read these:
Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong
The Geography of Thought, by Richard Nisbett
The Corpse Walker, by Liao Yiwu
Poor Economics, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Nudge, by Richard Thaler
Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Hughes Galeano
None of these was written more than 50 years ago (few more than 15), yet they have can give me much more valuable information about the world and how to look at it than Romeo and Juliet or King Lear ever did.
Nice list, JLemien. I’d add “Moneyball,” “Lonesome Dove,” “The Book that Made Your World,” “The Wisdom of Crowds,” “Princess Bride,” “The Painted Bird,” works by Charles Portis, “What I’d Say to the Martians,” “Born Standing Up,” “Boomerang,” “Bonfire of the Vanities,” and the first two-thirds of “Poisonwood Bible” (before it degenerates into a polemic). Malcolm Gladwell stuff is okay. Stephen King has a few decent works. Read John Grisham only when you’re on a train or in an airport or something. Oh, “Steve Jobs” was a good read though I’ll save you time and tell you the only real important sentence: “Was he smart? No. But he was a genius.”
And let us not forget “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And “Call of the Wild.” And “Huck Finn.” (It still works.) So does “Pride and Prejudice” (truly hilarious.)
Best of all: Genesis (of the Bible).
Books you can skip:
Catch-22 (great book but tedious to read despite the dark humor)
Moby Dick (read the comic book version)
Anything by James Fennimore Cooper
Anything by James Joyce
The Sound and the Fury (you won’t understand it, believe me)
Anything by Doestovesky (actually, I’m just about to embark on a Doestovesky sojourn but I know what I’m getting into)
Leviticus
Magic Mountain (huge, completely boring book by Thomas Mann I had to read in college)
Archie comic books (they’re not as good as they seemed back in 1960, trust me, though Betty and Veronica are still hot)
Wikipedia entries (tomorrow would be a good day to start not reading them)
Middlemarch (see point above about Magic Mountain)
The entire Cliff’s Notes collection (true story: in college I tried reading the Cliff’s Notes version of Middlemarch and found it worse than actually reading Middlemarch. So I read Middlemarch (most of it))
Dreams of My Father
They don’t all suck. They do have merit. I’m all for reading them in an academic setting. They’re like old pioneer houses: interesting to visit, to muse upon, etc. but no one would choose to live in one anymore.
Of course Shakespeare’s stories, or indeed those from any author, rely on the same plot devices or even the same story in many cases. Yes, plots are stolen if you so believe (or you could say shared, which is a tad less aggressive) and no doubt all echo with the same reason and rhyme.
The point however is not that Shakespeare or any author is original; they are not and never were. The joy however is seeing the same few stories retold with elegance and invention of language, which surely is the point here. That is why we read, because it reawakens something in us that cannot be stirred in any other way.
All life needs to be reinvigorated, and reading is one very good way to do that.
Well, you’re certainly an arrogant ass and probably as good an example as any of why so many get no joy from reading the classics or reading at all.
I think you’re being a little harsh of Dr. Hansen based on the limited cause of your own annoyance at Shakespeare. Are you sure you’re not just annoyed at your job?
Of course you’re right about repetition. Artists from all genres have been known to go back to the well of success, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough to find it once. Like Shakespeare’s comedies, we see this today in our modern books and movies. When something fresh and new and innovative is created, the non-creative people who make their livings from associated fields want sequel after sequel in order to cash in on people’s good feelings toward the original (and here I’m think about that classic, Robocop ;-)
But back to Shakespeare. I like the play Othello. It’s simple truth that there are sociopaths in the world, is a powerful cautionary tale. It teaches us to be slow to trust, that cognitive dissonance should not be ignored, that our emotions are not reliable indicators of truth. I also like Hamlet, though some of it is tedious and tangential. Hamlet’s play within the play is one of the most brilliant scenes ever written, imo.
Also, I’d like to second the message posted earlier about LibriVox.org. IF one is too lazy to read, you can download free audio books of classical (and other) works from the public domain. I’ve read for some of the titles, from Hugo’s “Les Miserables’ to the pulp science fiction title “Brigands of the Moon,” as well as edited and even managed the production of one book (a book of Dostoyevsky novellas and short stories). Check it out. Your iPod or modern portable device can keep you in touch with ancient erudition. BTW, I do think there is a qualitative difference between reading a book and listening to an audio book. But beggars, choosers, etc, etc.
Dr. Hanson is our Vanderpool.
” . . . can I tell you a little about this vanishing flower that you crushed?”
The flower, today, is our culture – our precious country.
” . . . cecidit velut prati/ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam/tactus aratro est.”
” . . . it fell, like a flower/at the edge of a field that the plow barely/touches in passing.”
but where there’s life there’s hope, and we ain’t dead yet
Thank you. Tears.
Nobody including Dr. Hanson reads Shakespeare in private? One contrary instance disproves your silly conjecture. I, for one, read Shakespeare in private.
I am nothing if not critical but truth is truth to th’ end of the reckoning.
This was meant to be a reply to 44. MaxMBJ.
I, too, have read a good bit of it privately and went to high school in a time and place where you couldn’t get out without at least some exposure to Shakespeare. I have a nice leather-bound Shakespeare collection on the bookshelf behind me as I write this. Though most of my reading these days is on my Kindle – lots easier to store than all those books – I’m just not comfortable without a collection of my favorites in their dead tree form close by me.
Unfortunately, these days you can get through high school and college, and with decent grades, without ever reading all of any book. At most the typical college student other than English majors gets a semester or two of “Literature” using the new versions of Norton’s Anthology in which they’ve gone around the World and dredged up crap to celebrate diversity. Most of my staff in the last decade or so of my career were twenty, thirty-something college grads, about half lawyers, and it is fair to say that they were essentially cultural illiterates. There’s no point in quoting, borrowing, or aluding to great literature with them because it is all lost on them and anything other than the simple declarative sentence is too long, complicated, and boring for them. The do know a lot about sex, movies, popular music, and sports.
I was being a bit, how do you Americans say it … hyperbolic?
Of course some read Shakespeare in private. If you can do it, more power to you. He does have some of the greatest gems of human wisdom ever penned.
I taught Macbeth to high school sophomore for a dozen years or so by listening with them to a professional recording and following along in the book. By the end of the second or third year, after doing this four times a day, I pretty much memorized the entire play. It has served me well all these years as lines from it come up to match experiences. “If twere done when tis done, twere well it were done quickly.”
Of course, he could have more simply said, “Do it before you chicken out” but I like his way of saying it better. But again, you about need a classroom setting to even hear all the words correctly.
I am currently working on Pharr’s Homeric Greek- or should I say I am struggling vainly with it- in its book form, but I would much rather have it on my iPad… if I had an iPad. When Homeric Greek and the Loeb Classics appear as eBooks I will probably get an iPad. My concern is not so much with the classics, though, as with new works by authors with high ambitions who write for the kind of people who are interested in advancing the cause of our Western heritage. Some works are very expensive to produce and only appeal to a small audience. Also I’m worried about forces hostile to my Western heritage getting control of the spigot, as they have done in the academic world. Wikipedia is an example of that danger. Dedicated, they say, to the free dissemination of ideas it has become just the opposite. Whatever happens, publishers and editors will still be needed. Wikipedia is not the way I want things to go, but the door is open to others. One resource I greatly admire is the Gutenberg Project which is a rich repository of some of the most delightfully obscure material.
“No, by Godfrey, we’re paying for what’s broke, me and Shane!”
This is my favorite quote in the movie Shane. It is just after the big bar fight.
It gives me goosebumps just thinking about when Shane twirls his pistols, near the end of the movie.
“Shane” has so much greatness–the story, the major and minor characters, scenery, the mysteriousness of Shane, the clashing values of the small farmers and the ranchers, the pains and longings that are left unsaid, and the relationships between Shane, the boy, and the boy’s parents. And the head rancher, who is the ostensible head of the bad guys, gets his chance to explain himself. The movie was made in a simpler time, but it has much more depth and complexity than most movies today.
And Jack Palance is one of the best bad-guys ever.
Notice how Jack Palance sits on his horse. Yes, this is great acting.
Here’s a project for someone with lots of money: Hire Dr. Hanson to produce a Youtube series of “Reading the Classics.” I’d love to read the classics but need a guide. I think many others do too.
Try looking up The Teaching Company. It may be just what you’re looking for (minus Dr. Hanson).
Here’s a compare and contrast lesson for you: see how the work of a British schoolgirl from a poor family, around 1900, should make most “educators” of today ashamed of themselves….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2087605/Fannie-Bryans-magical-century-old-exercise-book-humbling-lesson-todays-schools.html
VDH, I am a voracious reader and have been as far back as I can remember. My father loved to read with me as a child and my curriculum in early school days had something called SRA or a similar name…color coded books to pass from one level to the next.
My high school required that we read and pass courses in reading, comprehension and discussion of great books.
To this day, I go through “reading withdrawal” symptoms if I don’t have a book that I am thoroughly engaged in, usually in the evening.
However, not everyone has had my experience. Many parents do not share the joy of reading with their children. Many schools are so busy indoctrinating little “leftists in training” that they could not be bothered to instill in them all the benefits that come from understanding good literature…and appreciating it.
I don’t mind slang. I don’t mind TV. I love sports and still play whatever my body can endure. However, a well rounded person should not be taught WHAT to read, but HOW to read. Read all that gives you pleasure, makes you think, informs you, expands you, reveals you.
I may enjoy Nelson DeMille’s “Nightfall” or Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” or Stanley Kurtz’ “Radical in Chief” or Laura Hillebrand’s “Unbroken”…and derive just as much pleasure as reading “The Federalist Papers” or the works of Cicero.
What defines us as a people, as a nation of countrymen, is the desire to pass down the wisdom accumulated and to be shared, not the strangling indoctrination of a narrow path of forced groupthink.
My father passed to me the joy of sharing the gathering of the fruits of knowledge…but did not limit me to only those trees he enjoyed picking from, but let me choose any new one that fulfilled me.
For that…and many other things, I am so lucky to have had him.
And you…with whom to share my thoughts.
Thank you.
I remember SRA cards, too.
The reading/English teachers at our middle school are delighted when students read…no matter what they are reading. So a child who is an excellent reader is not encouraged to read something more challenging because the child is reading! She loves to read! What more could we ask? Well, we could ask that the teachers work to make her an even better reader instead of letting her pass her time reading the quick and easy. Would that be too much to ask? Indeed, it does seem to be too much to ask. Schools are under so much pressure to improve the performance of lagging students that excellent students are allowed to drift without much direction.
Read many classics in school and take some exception to what Prof Hanson says. Many of the classics were considered great books because they introduced ideas in provoking ways that were new back then, but are common place now. For example, I don’t remember getting anything out of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”. It never occurred to me that society’s justice was always fair in the first place, but I suppose Hardy shocked his Victorian audience back in the day. I love Tolstoy, but couldn’t get through “Crime and Punishment” or “Les Miserables” (although the first couple chapters are amazing). I’ve found that some classics are wonderful, but the difficulty of plowing through others is not worth the effort, at least for me. Either way, I prefer the classics that inspire rather than the ones that educate according to some worldview or describe the failings of human nature. I’m well acquainted with the failings of human nature. I want to be inspired.
It may be possible to once again get young people READING using the new technology. Then it is simply a matter of guiding them into worthwhile material. There is indeed too much of a choice of what to read today, and no one with sensibility to guide a young mind.
We have never before had such open access to the great minds, and dilletantes who write well about subjects which do not enrich our lives or educate us
Funny how the guy who wrote this article wanted to differentiate himself from the ones he is accusing as dumbs oinking pigs. too cool.
Go read a book, moron. You might learn something.
You are missing the point Victor, the scientific hegemony are pushing an anti intellectual agenda in schools and discouraging reading in favour of time spent on the instant gratification of impulses because they know books, especially older books but including many recent publications. I’ve just read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo – it should be assigned reading for those Panglossian pseudo – intellectuals who shout “conspiracy theory” when somebody suggests there is a need for greater transparency at both ends of the political spectrum.
What scare the New World Order wishers about good books is they are full of ideas. And ideas are very dangerous things.
This is an interesting perspective on current education, modern day intelligence and the ravages of technology.
Should more students read Greek philosophy and the classic’s? Yes, of course. But is the author saying that man has no more to discover in original thought or that all great literature has been written fascinates me. As a writer he himself seeks an audience for his work, his unique perspective on the age old themes of love, betrayal, greed, stupidity and obsession. What is old can be made new again, we just need to spend the time exploring it.
As previously stated, technology can be used to encourage people to read. Perhaps someone who begins with a simple book will join a book club and be challenged by other members to read more difficult literature.
Personally, I have studied and read the classic’s. I no longer have any desire to read a sentence that goes on and on and along the way meanders away from clear meaning. Is it not more difficult to communicate one’s message with eight words than with thirty-five? I would say so.
Have a lovely day
I’ve seen the comments above that more students should read Greek or Latin, and I am dubious. I think that learning Portuguese, Chinese or even Dutch would be more useful. Not only does literature exist in these other languages, but people still use them to communicate as well. I’ve never made a friend from speaking Latin, but I have made many from speaking a living language. There is also the future of a child to think of: it is possible that a child forced to read Virgil in the original will develop a passion for it, but is is not more likely that the child will suffer under this yoke? Learning a living language will give the child opportunities to explore a new culture and a new world, to make friends and lovers, to have otherwise impossible business opportunities, and incredible personal growth. Could I get all that from studying ancient Greek?
There was a time, not long ago, that to get a College Preparatory high school diploma, one have to have two years of Latin AND two years of a “foreign” language. That, of course, was before the primary goal of what they now style as education became the development of the child’s self-esteem rather than their mind.
You can actually learn a lot, about language in general (and your own language, in particular) by studying a dead language like Latin or Greek. As long as the teacher isn’t trying to teach “spoken” Latin or something silly, but is in fact trying to get the student to the point of reading real Latin as soon as possible (in my classes, it’s Catullus ASAP), the students who persevere are likely to learn a lot about grammar and syntax and nuances of style. This is particularly worthwhile these days, because, all too often, students are asked to read only very superficially–for the big, obvious, main ideas, not for anything subtle–and also most of the classes in English literature and ‘social studies’ don’t ask the students to read anything (in their own language) that’s at all challenging. It’s good for bright students to be asked to do something difficult, and Latin (not to speak of Greek) is quite good for that.
I really enjoy your writing. This piece, and your piece remembering Christoper Hitchens, are superb. You are the reason that, at 62 years old, I have a Thucydides on my nightstand.
The great thing about the INTERNET and e-gadgets is that you HAVE TO READ in order to use them.
Typing is also a skill that used to be reserved for secretaries and computer geeks.
Think of all the black people who can read now because of the INTERNET. How else would they know how to form thieving flash-mobs? –OOPS. <–Bad example. ;p
Not really if you’re of the age that has been around e-gadgets their whole life. There are plenty of young people out there who’ve never read or followed the instructions to ANYTHING in their lives.
No wonder condoms fail.
One of the great wonders of my life is that neither of my stepsons, aged 25 and 29, has come to me wanting money for some girl’s abortion, because I assure you that neither of them has ever read or followed the directions to anything, at least not while in my presence. ‘Course, if they’d needed abortion money, they probably wouldn’t have come to me but rather to their mother, who would have given it to them without questions and I’d have never heard about it.
It is interesting that in mentioning several notable politicians and criticizing them based upon classic characters, the author left out the most recent and egregious example of ignorance: George W. Bush. Perhaps Mr. Hanson only chose to refer, when speaking of reading, to those who may have actually been literate at all.
Oh, I had heard that Pres. George W. Bush was a rather well-read man; have you proof that he was both ignorant and barely literate?
I suppose I used, as proof that he was barely literate, the fact that he was unable to put together an intelligible sentence in his native language.
GWB’s college grades were better than those of those intellectual paragons of the left, Algore and Jon Kary. As President Reagan said, “It isn’t that liberals are ignorant, it’s that so much of what they know is wrong.”
Bullsh*t. The fact that he could jumble a phrase had nothing to do with it. I’m betting you used as your “proof” the fact that the leftist mainstream media conspired to promote the notion that GWB was ignorant. Just like it did with Sarah Palin. (can you say journolist?) You are living proof that their tactic worked, at least on those narrow minds who failed to look beyond the pages of Newsweek or the New York Times. But really Vicki, you’re still taking shots at GWB? That dog no longer hunts. Like a yappy little mutt it merely nips annoyingly at the heels of a great writer like Professor Hanson. Go back to HuffPo. You are ineffective here.
It’s amazing to me how pervasive the notion that GWB is ignorant, almost illiterate as a result of leftist propaganda. Research his college records; you might be a bit surprised.
“Research his college records; you might be a bit surprised.”
Yale undergraduate with a MBA from Harvard who also trained as a F102 jetfighter pilot?
Obviously a moron.
Not to mention that GWB wrote his own autobiographical book unlike Obama. Why did Obama not write a single article while head of Harvard’s Law Review? Probably because he cannot write.
Jersey Shore and mush like that are to blame. Just complete boredom.
An ancient book is not necessarily a good book.
Some are the vegetables of the meal that is life.
You read them because they make you sounder in constitution.
Around the corner is the strong AI-driven book, where one’s brain is directly linked to the Internet and one participates in the dynamically generated book, which is “written” based on one’s taste and experience. A holobook, if you will.
Exactly! I like the merging of book and brain. Perhaps that is one of the final ideas Steve Jobs worked on?
Obviously you are a victim of overcooked mushy vegetables whose flavor has been reduced to the same mush as their fiber and fabric. It doesn’t have to be that way, my friend …
It’s heartwarming to hear (so to speak) serious reading praised like this. I think many people feel that we are losing something by neglecting reading in the din and rush of our digital world. And anyone with a degree in the humanities believes (and wants to believe) that there is something irreplaceable and necessary about reading the classics. I certainly think so and appreciate anyone preaching that message. But I have to say I am also often disappointed in the people making the case. Take someone like Harold Bloom. I often agree wholeheartedly about what he has to say about literature and the wisdom that can be found there, but..does anyone think him wise other than Bloom himself? And Mr. Hanson: such a right-wing ideologue he cannot write a short essay on the value of reading without taking gratuitous — and unsupported — swipes at his political enemies. Where is the self-awareness? Or humility? Or simple ability to stay on topic?
The study of literature might offer a chance to achieve wisdom, but apparently it does not guarantee it.
I think that both Dr. Bloom and Dr. Hanson are wise, and I think you are an arrogant leftist ass. What is it about lefties that makes them feel so good about themselves and have so little reason to do so?
Oh, I dunno…..playing soccer where they keep no score or getting gold stars every day no matter what?
Yes. No winners, no losers, and everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.
Hardly the way to prepare students for the real world. Just another display among many to show just how removed from reality liberals tend to be. This is why it’s imperative to remove them from the roles of being in charge of our children’s education.
When I read the phrase “one or two hours a week” of reading, I admit to a thrill of horror. If I were limited to only two hours a week of reading, I’d go mad!
I think Mr. Hansen is missing a point in his article: there were always bookworms, and everybody else, and there still are. I don’t recall some golden age of bookreading before iPads were invented, and even when I was a boy and television was in its infancy, bookworms were rare. In fact, we were rare enough to rate our own nickname — bookworm.
I think there are simply people who are more attuned to reading and people who aren’t. I don’t think it’s all to do with technology. As Mr. Hansen points out, things don’t really change that much, and reading history illustrates that vividly.
I note that he doesn’t talk about Kindles or eBooks in his article, which I’ve found have made reading even more of a treat. Most of the older books are now public domain, which means they’re free on Kindle. Thanks to modern technology, I now have a library people could once only dream of (including, yes, Moby Dick, Grant’s Memoirs, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and it’s all a free download.
The way I see it, there are people who watch videos on iPads, and people who read books on Kindle. Just like in the old days there were people who read books and people who whittled, or played solitaire. I’m not sure it’s a sign of any societal deterioration, frankly.
Gibbon, hard to get through? I don’t think so. The whole work is long indeed, but the Decline and Fall is the single best non-fiction prose work in English. The sentences, to be sure, are not from the Hemingway school of monosyllabic simplicity, but they are beautifully ornate and finely crafted. Sadly, the available editions in the early 21st century are not very good. We need new editions, with more annotations, maps, and translations of the classical language quotations.
I was thrilled to receive a Kindle fire for Christmas. I’ve wanted a reader since they came out. I downloaded several classics and began reading “The Iliad”. I had read the real books of all of Jane Austen’s works and most of C.S. Lewis, and even took on the unabridged version of Hugo’s “Les Miserables”, but I’m finding it difficult to make it through “The Iliad”. Also the Kindle fire is not good for one easily distracted like myself as I can get weary of Iliad and take on…Angry Birds. I needed this article to give me a wake up slap. Thanks and ouch!
Shop around for translations of the Iliad. If the one you’re reading now doesn’t “click” for you, you might like another one better. When I was in middle school and was assigned the Odyssey, I was thrilled by the prose version we were given (I think W.H.D. Rouse), though I would probably not want to read anything but a verse one these days. I’ve read the Fagles Homers with pleasure (I used to like the Lattimore a lot, too).
I just don’t “get” contrary liberals, especially those of the first-wave Baby Boomer vintage. As someone born in 1962 to parents who were not of the so-called “greatest generation,” I have spent my entire life sandwiched between the knee-jerk pomposity of Baby Boomers and that of their smug children born in the ’70s. They take everything as a personal attack on their own tastes and feel the need to preen in public and make a bitchy comment as a shortcut to wit. As Voltaire supposedly said, “A witty comment never proved anything…”
And indeed they prove nothing. And so they attack Dr. Hanson instead, in their typically mean way for things he neither said nor recommended. Right there, in the middle of Hanson’s essay, for everybody to read, he writes:
“I am not calling for us to be academics or scholastics with our noses in books or our heads up our posteriors; but to match physicality and pragmatism with occasional abstraction and reflection from the voices of the past — just a little, now and then, to remind us that Twitter or Facebook speed up communication, but can slow down thought.”
There. You don’t have to give up your Kindles, your Tweets, or your opinions on other works of literature that Hanson does not mention. All he wants you to do is occasionally stretch your reading list.
Good lord, liberals are always telling us what to eat, how much to exercise, when to get a smear or a probe, who and how to sleep with someone, and how to furnish our homes, roast coffee, drive, purchase, abort and call in the hospice, etc., and Hanson merely suggests we put aside the gadgets and do a little reflective reading now and then, and a whole hornet’s nest of libs take it personally.
I agree with everything I’ve read in this thread except the Obama bashing. The Replicants have been the party of intransigence, fear mongering, and above all, science deniers. Their reading list can be imagined as ‘thought restricted’. whereas Obama has a good book of his own out there.
Another mind-numbed lefty robot heard from. the dKos or HuffPo village is missing one of its useful idiots.
Prove it.
ha ha ha ha ha, good one!
When you’re lying on your death bed, I highly doubt you will be thinking of how to create a new atom splitter.
Bill Aires has a good book of his own out there. There. I fixed it for you.
Science deniers? Are you referring to global warming-uhh, climate change-ummmm, global climate disruption-uhhh… Wait. What exactly is the frightening phrase du jour? To quote the great Michael Crichton, if it’s consensus, it isn’t science.
I believe the suggestion that Prof. Hanson create a video series on reading the classics is absolutely superb. Given that he understandably might not wish to do this gratis-on-YouTube, may I humbly suggest that he and Roger Simon could get together and come to an agreement to publish such a series on PJTV, ala the Klavan/Whittle discussions if on the cheap, or more industriously like Scott Ott’s constitution series.
I would love to see it.
Me three!
Me four, but I can read and so would rather watch a class of his instead. Maybe one of the institutions he works for would allow the publication of his class on iTunes university. There are a couple odd lectures of his there there but a full class would be great.
This reminds me of the latest Woody Allen’s movie “midnight in Paris”. The young aspiring writer dreams of living in the 1920ies Paris – and when he, by chance, gets there, he meets a young aspiring girl who similarily condemns her own time as too primitive and boring and wants to live in Belle Époque Paris. And interestingly enough, people in the Belle Époque believe their time is primitive and dream of living in the times of Renaissance.
I am sure that Victor Hanson is aware that some of his complaints about the crudeness of his time are eternal.
“О tempora, о mores!”
In short, “О tempora, о mores!”
Agree except that Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of Rome is not tough reading. It’s hard to put down.
It’s why I blog. When I’m gone there will be my words and discussions left behind. Perhaps in the distant future, there will be forensic anthropologist who recover all of our archived contributions, and pour over them to get a better picture of our era. It gives me comfort to know, when I’m gone that my family can still read, and look at what I found interesting and amusing.
I have always read a lot, but the memory that comes to my mind of me reading is staying up nights reading the Dune novels, one after another. The way Herbert wrote required the reader to think, and in my case to try, and think ahead of him. I stopped reading the series after Frank Herbert died. They just weren’t the same anymore.
http://www.dunenovels.com/novels
Known as ‘The book disposal’ amongst our friends who have embraced their Kindles and given us their books.
Nothing compares to touching paper. Books don’t need recharging, can continue being read when the aircraft is touching down or rolling out. Tossed in your briefcase, bag with reckless abandon.
Very few movies, let alone t.v. shows capture the meaning and/or essence of a book. JMO.
I’ve got a few problems with your assumptions.
“In this age of the iPhone and Xbox, is the era of reading good books over?”
The problem I have as well as everyone in my family no decent books have come out that are worth reading. I’ve read probably 3 books last year. Two of them political and one of them fantasy. The quality of content in books have dropped significantly, even non-fiction works seem to be of lesser quality.
“indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought. None of us thinks back a year ago to a great video game session”
Hate to break it to you but video games are very involved. Online shooters require a great deal of thought and involvement. To stay consistently in 1st place on Battlefield 3 you have to be aware of where your squad mates are, what weapons you are using what and where the enemies are marked and then decide what you want to change in your class of choice. The upcoming Tribes: Ascend continues the Tribes tradition of creating a shooter that requires near mathematical precision. Knowing everything about the arcs, timing, skiing, delays on your guns and grenades are all required in a game where you can go 340 K/ph and have jet-packs. Heck there are even youtube videos designed to help you breakdown the very mathematical formulas that each weapon works on and how to apply it to its frictionless, sloped, jet-pack filled speed fest. Such depth is the rule now and not the exception. Don’t plan on playing street fighter on any level without know the size of each characters hitboxes and how to combo-cancel.
Finally there are narrative driven games. Last year showed me that video games have beaten out books when it comes to quality of writing. L.A. Noire, Dues EX: Human revolution took lost and currently crappy forms of literature and turned them into unforgettable interactive experiences. Emotional content is also catching up to books. Dead Spaces pants soiling frights and Portal 2s humor are better then any book I’ve read in the last few years and last year aside I read a lot.
You may not play video-games and I think its a safe bet you don’t but it is simply wrong for you to scape-goat them and toss them in with trash like our modern TV line-up and last years dearth of quality movies.
And mastering the intricacies of these games gives you insight into the human condition and expands your intellectual horizons, how, exactly?
“And mastering the intricacies of these games gives you insight into the human condition and expands your intellectual horizons, how, exactly?”
Aside from the wall of text I already posted I’ll answer your question with my own. You really thing modern literature actually does that?
Reading through an old Norton Anthology from, say, about 1970 before the dredged up all the PC crap to celebrate diversity certainly will help you understand the world around you. Mastering the intricacies of those games, or mastering the law or medicine makes you a trade school graduate, not an educated person.
In the last decade or so of my career, a good number of my subordinates were 20-30-something lawyers. They could write you a decent legal memo that would usually be right on the law but had the literary interest of one of those rice crackers the dieters try to live on. They were totally ignorant of history, literature, music, art, Western culture generally, unless you wanted to know about sex, movies, contemporary pop music, or sports.
This isn’t a modern phenomena. My great grandfather and grandfather complained about that very same thing. To think that the next generation is dumber than the last is as ancient as Socrates who said “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” That ancient train of thought is as wrong as it is old.
@Chris – Yes, the meme has been around for a long time, and maybe with some truth, maybe not. I suspect a lot of it over time had to do with people from the “lower classes” making it up into more “proper” society as technology and portable wealth slowly and then precipitously changed social orders.
That said; we now have thirty or forty years of degeneracy going. Schools are turning out functional illiterates with 4.0 GPAs. Colleges are giving degrees to people who paid the money, showed up occassionally, and couldn’t pour pee out of a boot even with the instructions on the heel. Sorry, I’ve worked with them, I’ve hired them because they were the best I could get; these people are pig ignorant. They can’t think, they can’t speak, the can’t write. If you took s**k, f**k, and f*g out of their vocabulary, they would only be able to grunt, point, and spit. Show me a group of twenty-something males together and I’ll show you a puddle of spit on the sidewalk. We need to bring back those “No Spitting” signs from a century ago – and turn your Goddamned hat around and take it off when you’re indoors. The colleges are a welfare scheme for college educated college professors and a breeding ground for “Young Communists.” After the Counter-revolution, we put them to work in the fields.
“That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pin-ball!” “Tommy” The Who, 1969.
Thank you, Mr Hanson, for a superb dissertation. You are right, of course; those who note the Kindle readers on the train, and the plethora of reading options unfortunately miss the masses of barely literate, media-engrossed youth of the past 20 years, and counting. Even bright kids today have the merest shred of awareness of classic works; our computers and Idevices have progressively whittled down our attention spans.
It is Rome in 410, and nobody notices the barbarians massing at the gates.
What’s a ‘book’?
What about the simple fact that the more one reads, and thereby better understands how to use the primary tool by which we communicate, the better off we’ll all be?
And excellent post as usual, but Dr. Hanson fails to note another factor in the dearth of reading: the inexplicable cultural bias against wisdom.
Nowhere was this more evident to me than my home state of Alabama. If you just happened to be a couple of IQ points above average, you were made fun of, harassed, ostracised and in many cases, beaten up. You need look no further than the popularity of shows such as American Idol and Jersey Shore to see this in action. Jay Leno’s man on the street questions should give us all pause, but, naturally won’t, because we don’t know what we don’t know and lack the intellectual curiosity to educate ourselves.
After all, dumb is just so kewl.
This reminds me of the essay of C.S. Lewis entitled “On the Reading of Old Books.” Lewis described the benefits of “keep[ing] the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds . . .”
As, like, a modern youth or whatever, i thought I’d take some time out from watching Jersey Shore in order to (with brazen arrogance!) sip gratefully from your fountain of knowledge about my generation. You’re right, of course! I was blind, but now I see! Enlightenment pierces my shrouded ignorance! Where have you been in our dull, ignorant lives? How have we not noticed the value of such obscure literature as Dante’s Inferno? How has the most educated generation in history somehow achieved such entirely without reading? Why, I can only imagine off of the shoulders of such towering literary giants as your noble self! All of this time watching ‘My Super Sweet 16′! Curse thy self, That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven!
Thank you, you arrogant prick.
You lefty children tell yourselves that you are the smartest and most educated generation ever because your lefty professors told you that; they had to do something to sell you on starting your productive life head over heels in debt. You are not! You may well be the most schooled and credentialed generation but most of you are functional illiterates indoctrinated to leftist orthodoxy and programmed to serve as useful idiots. Outside the hard sciences, where few spoiled American brats go, there is no such thing as academic rigor; if you pay and show up, you will have a piece of paper to hang on your wall and play snob over. If you’re lucky, when you go out into the world of work, you’ll have a hiring manager then a supervisor who is just as illiterate and spoiled as you are and you can all sit around and worship each other while your company goes down the tube or if you’re working in government while each and every day the few remaining productive people hate you more and more. Have a nice life, punk!
Snyplo, your ignorant, sarcastic post confirms the Hanson thesis to a tee.
Most educated generation in history? That’s spooky. Actually, it’s a joke. Most educated in what, Diversity Studies? Certainly not in History, otherwise you wouldn’t be clamoring for the failed European Socialist ideal. Like my old grandpappy used to say, what a shame- All that education and not a lick of sense.
As a snider aside, atrocious, atrocious writing.
I have a kindle and an ipad. I do love both of them and both are fully loaded with public domain 19th and early 20th century folklore and mythology books , BUT-
I’ve noticed that what I read on an electric screen doesn’t seem to stay with me like what I read in a book. It’s as if the words being on a screen rather than on paper makes my mind skim what I’m reading rather than truly reading it. With the best will in the world, I find itr very hard to stop skimming and actually read and comprehend. I do not understand why this is so, but now that I’ve realized I have this problem , I use my kindle and ipad primarily to ‘test run’ books : If I like the book on electronic,I know I will like it even more in print, so I buy what I already have as a pdf or kindle download.
Fortunately for me, quite a few POD publishers are bringing back old folklore and mythology texts to print-some of the books I so purchased will set you back several hundred dollars if purchased used, if you can even find a copy.
I wonder if I am the only one who suffers from this ailment : Inability to retain or understand text on a screen as well as text on a page. And I wonder if any other sufferers are trying to get through college courses with textbooks on a device only….
I understand how this could be true. Are there ways you can mark-up or highlight, your Kindle text? On a computer, I would take notes on a separate open Word document, sometimes cutting and pasting, sometimes writing brief summaries. I think the general phenomenon is that our technology permits us to do so many more things, that we tend more to do them in a generally more half-assed fashion or that a lot more incoming “new” info wipes out what we were thinking about, earlier.
The freest and best education is a library card.
Oh! I forgot. VDH I love you.
Re Christopher Hitchens. One blogger elseweb said that, with no more Hitchens, the English-speaking world was going to be able to get away with slightly more BS.
VDH: Examples of English usage and grammar to ponder abound in your paragraphs devoted to Christopher Hitchens–Wow!
You sagely provided several opportunities to pause and reflect; it was wonderful to read that section of the article.
Having read this piece, and the following comments, I’ve concluded that, “It’s back to night school” for me. Peace.
Professor Hanson,
What would you suggest as reading list for someone who would like to get started in the classics?
Why read? The answer is simple: there are two broad ways by which humans acquire knowledge of the world around them. The first is by direct experience(including empiral and experimental investigation); the second is by partaking of the wisdom and knowledge of others, hence reading. Until the electronic revolution, books were the primary written means by which humanity transmitted its values, knowledge and traditions from one generation to the next. No one person, no matter how well-traveled or acquanted with others, can know all other humans alive today, and no human can know those who lived in the past – except by reading. Winston Churchill may be dead and buried, but he lives on through the written word, as do many millions of others. The wisdom of the ages is available at your local library or bookseller.
“Why read?”, you ask. That was Prof. Hanson’s reason for publishing this piece in the first place.
Calm down. GA guilt is understandable; thinking that you’re a SME, is not.
It should be noted that reading alone is insufficient as a means by which to understand the world; a well-rounded human being must learn via direct experience as well as in the library. The opposite applies, however; a person who confines his investigation of the world to only that which he can sense and experience directly, is missing out on the vast wisdom and knowledge accumulated by others, much of which is contained within books.
Well. Okay. Just read the article again with an un-cluttered mind. If nothing else, the links that VDH provides should get you headed in the direction you seem to want to go.
The Holy Bible is the best resource to help us to get centered in this life in a world that’s increasingly spinning way out of control. Please consider studying the Bible. Join or form a new study/discussion group. The available online resources will just amaze you. May GOD Bless You. -cz-
***Our California public schools rate about 48th or 49th these days in nationwide testing, ***
That and the situation with Detroit are significantly due to changing demographics (modern books like “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”, or Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms”, may hint at why that is a factor).
Otherwise, bravo on an outstanding essay! I will be looking for some old books from the library.
My 2 cents. Reading makes you better informed. You become a better writer. You become a better speller. Military mom has it right, the library opens a whole world of thoughts and ideas.
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